A variety of businesses, enterprises, departments within larger companies, and other forms of organizations sell, lease or otherwise provide products to customers. In order to effectively manage the organization, it is desirable to gather knowledge about how much of which products are being provided during different periods. With this knowledge, replacement products may be ordered at the right time, product mix may be balanced to better achieve the goals of the organization, product pricing may be adjusted to better achieve the goals of the organization, reasons for inventory shrinkage may be rapidly identified and corrected, and the like. But the knowledge should be accurate, complete, and in a form that is readily understood so that good management decisions will result.
It is also desirable, and has been a long-standing practice, to gather knowledge about individual financial transactions that an organization engages in while providing products to customers. And, at least when products are bar-coded or otherwise individually identifiable, inventory usage knowledge has been simultaneously obtained and integrated with financial knowledge. This type of knowledge base is collected in a manner that allows it to be reasonably accurate and complete so that it provides an excellent management tool for minimizing losses, maximizing profits, and otherwise balancing the daily operations of an organization to best achieve the goals of the organization.
But when products are dispensed in bulk for individual transactions, management has traditionally had to suffer with extremely poor tools on which to base management decisions. Bulk products are provided to customers without packaging, labels, or other identifiers that convey the product's identity and quantity in a way that can be easily captured in the course of a transaction. An organization that dispenses beverages for on-site consumption, such as a bar, tavern, or restaurant, is one example of an organization that dispenses products in bulk for individual transactions. Bars typically sell alcoholic drinks in serving sizes of less than an entire container, or bottle, by dispensing alcohol from the bottle into a glass for on-site consumption by a customer.
In addition to difficulties associated with capturing inventory usage data for individual transactions, organizations that dispense bulk products in individual transactions face a more complex range of possible causes for variances between actual results and desired results or goals.
Following the example of a bar, and in particular a bar that free-pours drinks, variations generally occur both in inventory usage and in revenue collections. “Free-pouring” refers to a server, referred to herein as a bartender, pouring a drink from a bottle that does not have a pour spout, or from a bottle with a pour spout that does not control the amount of the drink that is poured. In a free-pouring establishment, the quantity of beverage dispensed for each drink is ultimately up to the bartender. With respect to inventory usage, there is variability in how accurately bartenders can free-pour specific volumes of drinks. Variability results because different pour spouts pour at significantly different pour rates. Still more variability results because the amount of product dispensed from a given pour spout will vary depending on the amount of liquid in the bottle, the viscosity of the liquid, the barometric pressure, the temperature, and the shape of the bottle. And still more variability results due to accidental overpouring or underpouring of drinks, intentional overpouring or underpouring of drinks, spillage, drink mistakes, and/or drink returns. For virtually every free-poured drink, the desired inventory usage (i.e., the intended amount of liquid a bartender's manager would want the bartender to dispense) is different than the actual inventory usage (i.e., the actual amount of liquid dispensed).
Desired revenue is the amount of money a bar's management intends to receive for a given transaction. Actual revenue is the amount of money that is actually received for a given transaction. With respect to revenue from individual transactions, variations between desired revenue and actual revenue may be caused from a variety of additional factors. For example, a bartender may accidentally or intentionally fail to charge a customer for a drink, accidentally or intentionally fail to ring up a drink even though a customer paid for the drink, accidentally or intentionally mischarge the customer for a drink, accidentally or intentionally collect the wrong amount of money for a drink, and/or accidentally or intentionally make an error in ringing up a drink.
As a result of the above discussed variations, actual inventory usage will invariably fail to correspond to actual revenue collections. Organizations typically use the term “shrinkage” to refer to this discrepancy. As a result, a number of prior art solutions have been presented in an effort to minimize the problems associated with the management and control of alcohol dispensation. The purpose of these solutions is to help bars control revenue, inventory, or both revenue and inventory.
Traditionally, bars have resorted to the occasional manual inventory procedure. Using this procedure, all opened and unopened bottles are visually examined and/or weighed to gain knowledge about the inventory. But this technique consumes so much time that it is performed only occasionally. Its occasional use causes this procedure to produce primarily stale data that merges distinct operational periods (quarters, months, weeks, days, shifts, happy hours, etc.). In even the most efficiently run bars, this procedure is still subject to large errors to the extent it is based on subjective human judgment to gauge amounts of product present in opened bottles and human labor to construct and tally inventory lists. Due to the poor quality of data obtained using this technique, it is of little value as a management tool.
A variety of higher-technology solutions have been proposed for use by bars to aid in capturing specific data describing inventory usage during individual transactions so as to provide better management tools. But such solutions have failed to adequately address all of a bar's needs. One example of such a solution is the incorporation of a point-of-sale (POS) system into a bar's operations. While POS systems provide many positive management tools, they are primarily revenue management tools that do not provide adequate tools for the management of bulk product inventory or for the reconciliation of revenue with bulk product inventory.
Some prior art systems attempt to address the problems of the variability inherent in free-pouring. One technique addresses dispensation control. In such systems devices are employed to control the amount of beverage dispensed for each transaction rather than rely upon the intentions and skill of the bartender in setting the proportions. One such system uses a spout that allows drinks to be poured only if the spout is placed in a magnetic actuator ring or collar. The actuator ring or collar is wired to a box that records the pouring of the drink. Another system uses a beverage gun. In this system, bottles are stored upside down in a tower-like structure. When the bartender presses a button on the beverage gun, the corresponding drink is run through pressurized lines and out of the beverage gun.
While these systems do a good job of collecting accurate data concerning the events about which data are collected, they are highly disadvantageous for marketing reasons alone. Such devices cause the organization to fail to meet marketing goals by causing the organization to fail to provide what the customer wants. Free-pouring is preferred by most customers, most bartenders, and most bars. The reason many people go to bars is for the experience. Free-pouring gives a bar more flexibility in pouring beverages. It also lets customers know that the serving sizes of their beverages are not being precisely controlled. Bar customers typically like to see their beverages free-poured, especially when they are ordering a more expensive drink. Bar customers do not like systems that electronically or mechanically control pour size because they know they have no chance of getting special treatment, such as an overpoured or custom-proportioned beverage for a good customer. Worse, they may think that the bar owner purposefully set the system to a smaller-than-average pour size in order to increase profits. Free-pouring is also preferred by bartenders because it is stylish, it allows them to pour with one hand, it allows them to engage in what is known as flair bartending (using showmanship, such a flipping bottles and glasses) and it gives them considerable added freedom and flexibility in serving beverages, especially mixed beverages. Free-pouring is almost a necessity in certain bar marketing concepts including, for example, neighborhood bars and upscale bars. Generally speaking, bars are very competitive businesses, and customers are more likely to drink at a bar where they can enjoy a better ambiance, better service, and a better overall experience, which includes free-poured beverages. The loss of goodwill and damage to a bar's image caused by these dispensation-control systems can be significant.
In addition, these dispensation-control systems are tremendously expensive to buy, to install, and to operate. They are also bulky and force bartenders to pour drinks only from the location where the hardware is installed. If the system breaks down, business may literally come to a standstill (which can be very costly, especially on a busy night). The magnetic-collar system requires the use of two hands and permits only one drink to be poured at a time. In either system, the cost is so great that bars are urged by financial considerations to use the system with only some of the bar's inventory, while relying entirely on manual techniques for the remaining inventory. Due to a lack of universal application within a bar, the resulting knowledge base tends to be incomplete. And, the magnetic-collar system is easily defeated by removing collars so that the collected data is likely to be even more incomplete.
Some prior art systems attempt to address the inventory management problems faced by bars. This class of systems includes the use of electronic tags, called “asset tags” herein, that are attached to bottles, typically at the bottle neck or at the bottom of the bottle. These electronic tags generally attempt to detect when the bottles to which they are attached are tilted more than 90° past their normal upright positions, to time the durations for which the bottles remain in their tilted orientations, and to report the tilting events to a data processing system.
But the prior art versions of such devices are entirely inadequate for these purposes. The data collected and processed by such systems do not accurately describe the inventory usage. And, such systems fail to detect and report when inaccurate data is likely being collected. Such systems also fail to provide feedback describing the performance of the bartender. For example, the prior art systems do not capture information describing the bartender's intentions with respect to a pour and/or fail to determine whether the bartender's actions were consistent with those intentions. And, the information presented by such systems tends not to be presented in a form that is quickly and easily related to the establishment's operations.